Reading in Spanish and Italian: Effects of Age of Acquisition in Transparent Orthographies?. Issue 9 (September 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Davies, Rob; Wilson, Maximiliano; Cuetos, Fernando; Burani, Cristina
• Is Part Of: Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. Volume 67:Issue 9(2014)
• Page Start: 1808
• Page End: 1825
• Publication Date: 2014-09
• Subjects: Orthography -- Age of acquisition -- Frequency -- Transparent -- Reading; Psychology, Experimental -- Periodicals; Psychophysiology -- Periodicals; Psychology, Comparative -- Periodicals; 150.72405
• DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2013.872155
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1747-0218

Abstract

Despite the similar transparency of their orthographies, reading in Italian has been found to be affected by frequency but not age of acquisition (AoA) [Barca, L., Burani, C., & Arduino, L. S. (2002). Word naming times and psycholinguistic norms for Italian nouns. Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 34, 424–434] while reading in Spanish is affected by AoA but not frequency [Cuetos, F., & Barbón, A. (2006). Word naming in Spanish. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 415–436]. We examined this cross-linguistic difference, firstly, through a reanalysis of the Italian and Spanish reading latencies. After eliminating several between-experiment differences, we replicated the AoA effect in Spanish but not in Italian and the frequency effect in Italian but not in Spanish. The cross-linguistic comparison could not equate stimulus imageability; therefore, secondly, we compared the Italian reading latencies with new Spanish reading latencies for imageability-matched words. We found frequency effects but neither an AoA effect nor a language by AoA interaction. We argue that the previously reported cross-linguistic difference in the AoA effect resulted from a between-study difference in stimulus imageability. More imageable words induced more semantic involvement in reading, yielding an AoA effect in Spanish.